How a Young Joe Biden Turned Liberals Against Integration

On May 15, two days before the 20th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, Brooke delivered an emotional address on the Senate floor. Gurney’s amendment would “put us back decades,” he thundered. “For two decades, the course has been sure but slow. And now we ask to hastily and drastically alter it. Why? Because many Americans have become confused by the rhetoric on busing.” Brooke boiled it down for them: “The issue is simple. Shall we or shall we not permit necessary remedies to a constitutional violation? ... The fact is that in many cases, busing is necessary to uphold the law.” Brooke called the amendment “unconscionable and unconstitutional,” and moved to table it. The Senate did so, by a single vote.

On May 16, Republican Sen. Robert Griffin of Michigan attempted to revive the anti-busing amendment—without the clause that allowed for the re-opening of court orders. Liberals tried to table this proposal, but they failed by one vote. Minority leader Hugh Scott and majority leader Mike Mansfield then offered a compromise: They’d leave the text of Griffin’s amendment intact—which included various anti-busing restrictions but excised the section about the court orders—and added the qualifier that such legislation was not intended to weaken the judiciary’s power to enforce the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments.

Anti-busing leaders denounced the Scott-Mansfield compromise, which passed 47 to 46. Brooke voted for the compromise, satisfied that the language about the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments was a sufficient safeguard of minority students’ rights. The larger omnibus bill, which Brooke also supported, then gained passage by a wide majority.

In the coming months, as busing beset Boston, the ranks of pro-busing senators would shrink even more. But Ed Brooke remained a vocal defender of busing, even as he was vanquished by a young senator who hitched his rising star to the anti-busing movement.

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At 32 years old, and sporting long sideburns, Joe Biden was the youngest member of the Senate. During his initial 1972 campaign, Biden advocated for racial equality. He questioned the motives of anti-busing leaders and charged that Republicans had exploited the busing issue in order to win white votes. He also supported the Swann decision, and opposed a constitutional amendment banning busing—as did the Republican incumbent he defeated, J. Caleb Boggs.

But during the campaign, Biden had begun to develop a convoluted position in which he supported busing as a remedy for “de jure segregation” (as in the Jim Crow South), while he opposed busing in cases of “de facto segregation” (as in Northern cities). Through his first two years in the Senate, he supported most—but not all—of the anti-busing legislation. In two crucial exceptions, he voted to table the Gurney Amendment in May 1974—and he also voted in favor of the Scott-Mansfield compromise. He sided with Brooke on both votes, and on both occasions their side prevailed by a single vote.

For these few votes, Biden attracted the fury of his white constituents. Delaware residents had formed the New Castle County Neighborhood Schools Association in order to resist desegregation. In June 1974, the group organized an event at the Krebs School in Newport, Delaware—as Brett Gadsden details in Between North and South. The event’s coordinator had recently declared, “We’re going to hound Biden for the next four years if he doesn’t vote our position.” Standing before a Krebs School auditorium packed with angry white parents, Biden explained that he supported busing only as a remedy for “de jure” segregation. He assured the crowd that any segregation in Delaware was “de facto,” and therefore—he claimed—beyond the authority of the courts. The crowd jeered him anyway until he departed. The ugly incident clearly left its mark on the senator.

A year later, in the summer of 1975, Boston erupted in more racial violence and braced for its second year of busing. Meanwhile, Brooke and Biden steeled themselves for a showdown on Capitol Hill.

Sen. Jesse Helms, a Republican from North Carolina, was the first to strike. On September 17, 1975, when a larger education bill came up for debate, Helms offered a crippling anti-integration amendment. It would prevent the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) from collecting any data about the race of students or teachers. In addition, HEW could not “require any school … to classify teachers or students by race.” Thus, HEW could not withhold funding from school districts that refused to integrate. “This is an antibusing amendment,” Helms explained. “This is an amendment to stop the current regiments of faceless, federal bureaucrats from destroying our schools.”

Biden rose to support Helms’s amendment. “I am sure it comes as a surprise to some of my colleagues … that a senator with a voting record such as mine stands up and supports [the Helms amendment].” Helms replied that he was happy to welcome Biden “to the ranks of the enlightened.” After the laughter died down, Biden launched an anti-busing screed. “I have become convinced that busing is a bankrupt concept.” The Senate should declare busing a failure, and focus instead on “whether or not we are really going to provide a better educational opportunity for blacks and minority groups in this country.” He praised Ed Brooke’s initiatives on housing, job opportunities and voting rights. In one breath, Biden seemed to reject busing in the North and the South, and claimed that he was committed to equal opportunity for African Americans.

Sen. Brooke campaigning for Richard Nixon in 1968. | Getty

A few other senators spoke briefly about the amendment, then Brooke sprung to action. The Helms amendment would eviscerate Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Brooke said, which enabled HEW to cut off funding to school districts that refused to integrate. Brooke asserted that the federal government should attempt other integration remedies before resorting to busing. “But if compliance with the law cannot be achieved without busing, then busing must be one of the available desegregation remedies.” Brooke introduced a motion to table Helms’s amendment. Brooke’s motion passed, 48-43. Biden wouldn’t budge, and voted with Jesse Helms and the anti-bussers.

Brooke had fought this fight before, but he would face a more formidable adversary in Joe Biden. When a southern conservative like Helms led the anti-busing forces, Ed Brooke could still rally his troops. But it would be tougher to combat the anti-busing faction when its messenger was a young liberal from a border state.

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Immediately after the Helms amendment was tabled, Biden proposed his own amendment to the $36 billion education bill, stipulating that none of those federal funds could be used by school systems “to assign teachers or students to schools … for reasons of race.” His amendment would prevent “some faceless bureaucrat” from “deciding that any child, black or white, should fit in some predetermined ratio.” He explained, “All the amendment says is that some bureaucrat sitting down there in HEW cannot tell a school district whether it is properly segregated or desegregated, or whether it should or should not have funds.” Finally, Biden called busing “an asinine policy.”

Brooke pointed out that the amendment would do much more than Biden claimed. Like the Helms gambit, it would still gut Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. But this time, a number of liberal senators that had opposed Helms’s amendment now supported Biden: Warren Magnuson and Scoop Jackson of Washington, where Seattle faced impending integration orders; and Thomas Eagleton and Stuart Symington of Missouri, where Kansas City confronted a similar fate. Mike Mansfield, the majority leader from Montana, also jumped on board. Watching his liberal colleagues defect, Republican Jacob Javits of New York mused, “They’re scared to death on busing.” The Senate approved Biden’s amendment. Biden had managed to turn a 48-43 loss for the anti-busing forces into a 50-43 victory.

In a seminal moment, the Senate thus turned against desegregation. The Senate had supported the 1964 Civil Rights Act, 1965 Voting Rights Act and 1968 Fair Housing Act. In the early 1970s, as President Richard Nixon and the House of Representatives encouraged the anti-busing movement, the Senate remained the last bastion for those who supported strong integration policies. Biden stormed that bastion, and it seemed to be falling. On September 23, another border-state Democrat moved against busing. Robert Byrd, the West Virginian who had since repudiated his Klan past, offered a perfecting amendment. It would prohibit busing beyond a student’s nearest school. It passed the Senate by a vote of 51-45.